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Increase Your eBay Success by Watching Your Competitors

How to improve your eBay sales by learning from what your competitors do successfully

This special guest article is by Dave Lovelace, a top eBay seller and creator of Auction Platinum Secrets, a popular eBay beginner's guide in which he offers the exclusive tips from one of eBay's top Platinum Powersellers.

In this article he shows you how to find a wealth of information that can make your eBay auctions more profitable—without spending a cent. He reveals what to look for in auctions to compete with yours in order to make yours more successful.

7 Things You Can Learn from Competing e-Bay Auctions

© by Dave Lovelace
http://www.auctionplatinum.com

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If you haven't discovered the benefits of legitimately "spying" on your competition, then it's time to start looking at your competitors' auctions, starting today.

Why?

As the old gold-rush miners use to say, "thar's gold in them thar hills"

Translation? There's golden nuggets of information to be found from your competitors that can turn your losing listings into profitable auctions.

But you might not realize how much you can learn until you know what you're looking for.

To begin with, don't bother looking at listings that haven't ended yet, you don't know what's going to happen with them. Instead, use the advanced search page to search for listings that sold. Just go to the advanced search page, type in the keywords that you know will find your competitors' items, tick 'Completed listings only' and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Set it to sort by 'Price: highest first'.

This will show you auctions competing with yours that have recently finished, starting with the ones that sold for the most (ignore any with prices in red... they didn't sell). Go through and take a look, paying special attention to the following 7 points:

1. Titles.

What information do the top sellers of your item put in their titles, and what do they leave out? If your titles are very different to theirs, it might be time for a rethink.

2. Descriptions.

You'll probably notice that the highest sellers haven't just copied text from the company's website or an Amazon.com review. They've gone to the trouble of writing a little about the item, and about themselves. Learn from their example.

3. Pictures.

I can almost guarantee you that the listing will have very nice pictures, not catalogue quality, but good enough to see what you're getting. With items of any significant cost, you'll probably find more than one photo from different angles.

4. Style.

Is it written conversationally, or in terse businesslike language? The way you should write entirely depends on what the market seems to like, and the market seems to like what the top sellers wrote.

5. Time.

It's pretty easy to ignore this as a factor without meaning to, but pay attention to when the top selling items' auctions began and ended. This might give you a few clues about the best to catch buyers who will bid highly on your item, and then you can schedule your items accordingly.

6. Price.

If your competitors are selling using Buy it Now, you can see what the maximum is that they've managed to sell for recently, and set your own Buy it Now price slightly below that.

7. Shipping.

Look around to see the sweet spot for shipping. If you can figure out a way to get your shipping costs lower than the highest sellers, then this is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself in the market.

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By doing a little "spying" on your competition, you'll begin to see what's already working. Then you can start to emulate your competitors.

Of course you don't want to copy them completely, but you can structure your auction similarly based on the info your competitors are using in the 7 categories listed in this tutorial.

Ready to start "spying"? Visit http://search.ebay.com, then scroll down to select "advanced search". You'll be on your way to discovering profitable short cuts for your next listing.

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Dave Lovelace is the author of e-Bay Platinum Profits, a step by step beginner's guide to making money on eBay "the right way the first time". Subscribe to Dave's FREE 9-day mini-course, "e-Bay Success Tips: Quick-Start Guide To Winning The Auction Game (for Newbies)" and discover everything you need to know to get started right away! Get lesson 1 in the next 2 minutes when you signup now. Go to => http://www.auctionplatinum.com/ebay-course.html

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